After multiple issues after a year and a half, I finally talked a vendor into replacing a temperamental server that’d been causing a one of my clients no end of fits. And so, at 5AM Tuesday morning, the hard drives were pulled and installed in a brand-spanking-new server. Miraculously, everything worked. Or so I thought…

At 5PM yesterday, I was notified by my customer that, “Our mail server has been down all day.” I’m not sure why they didn’t contact me about it earlier in the day, but… Further inspection of the server log revealed the following actualerror message:

Oct 20 05:53:12 antarctica dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 7307 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I’ll just kill myself now.

It seems that that when the new server rebooted and went through its normal bit of resetting the time, the mailserver died. However, since this is the actual error message, as listed in the maillog, it is apparent that their mail server has developed a personality.
Given its new-found malcontentment and predeliction to suicide, I couldn’t help but think perhaps it needs a companion… I know the perfect one…